City Park Chronicles: A Walk in the Park

Wednesday

Sep 5, 2012 at 3:50 PMSep 5, 2012 at 3:58 PM

Tom and Mike and I, and countless thousands of others – including many of us La Juntans – have gotten so much value out of the Southwest railway systems. In a Universe where “the only thing constant is change,” let’s make sure losing Amtrak isn’t one of those changes. What can we do to keep this train on track?

Susan Dietrich Schneider

Yesterday my dogs took me for our morning walk in the Park. I wondered what my next column would be about. “Well, I thought,” I could write about how nice and cool it is this morning, that’s new and different after this dry, hot summer.” We walked on, looking for something even more exciting.
“Let’s see. Hmmmm. There’s nobody here at 9 a.m. Maybe I could write about how nice and cool and quiet and peaceful it is here in the park on Labor Day. Well, that’s lovely for us, but probably wouldn’t translate so well in print.” At that point I asked for help.
“Oh, Park, I surrender my will to you. Let me be your tool – please give me a story.”
On we walked, and shortly met the first other park visitors of the day, and who was it but the Bigfoot man and his dachshund partner. My mind went blank as we greeted each other and passed on by. A journalist is supposed to be full of questions – where were mine? I rationalized that
I had already written about him in a previous column, I needed a new subject. Although I had no inkling at that time, this could have been a clue of what was to come … more deja vu all over again!
On we walked toward the gazebo. A couple of people seemed to be unloading an SUV, while another man was sitting at a table, a beautiful black and white dog at his feet. I found my tongue.
“Having a picnic?”
The seated man stood up. “Hello, Susan! How are you?”
It was Sam Middaugh, the Rocky Ford man I had written about in the Bigfoot column. And the beautiful dog at his feet was none other than Reba!
Sam said, no, they weren’t having a picnic; in fact, he had just picked up his son-in-law, Mike Byrne, and Mike’s brother Tom at the Amtrak station. They had traveled from Kansas City and St. Louis respectively, and were on their way to the San Juan Wilderness near Alamosa to do some hiking. Borrowing Sam’s car, they were in the process of packing their enormous “Gregory Denali-Pro” brand backpacks, weighing in at around 60 lbs. each.
“We do this every year,” Mike said. “It sure beats driving. I board the train at 11 p.m. in Kansas City. Tom is already on board coming from St. Louis, and we sleep all the way to La Junta. We arrive at 8:23 a.m., and Sam meets us at the station, so we’re up and ready to roll as soon as we arrive.”
“Trouble is, Amtrak is considering eliminating this route in the next couple years. No more service to Kansas City. La Junta would be left out too.”
“Oh, no, not another big blow,” I responded. Although I had heard this rumor before, it really hit home hearing it from these guys who use the train for their connection to nature. I, too, have a long history of wonderful Amtrak rides. For many years I rode the Amtrak Coast Starlight every weekend from my home near Dunsmuir, Calif., down to San Francisco when I was a free-lance musician. It was heavenly being rocked to sleep by the train’s gentle swaying motion and steady clacking of its wheels, as we rolled along the winding tracks through the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest under the moonlight. Like Tom and Mike, I would awaken fresh and ready to go.
Then when I came back home to Colorado in 2000, three of my old high school classmates and I decided to take the train down to Santa Fe as a sort of little reunion party of our own. What a great time we had, enjoying the luxury of that train ride, watching the colorful prairie stretching out forever from the observation car. We saw pronghorns by the score, hawks soaring overhead, cholla in full crimson bloom, an occasional deer or two, and then stretched our legs at the quaint, old Lamy train station, where we absorbed some living history of the beautiful Southwest.
Tom and Mike and I, and countless thousands of others – including many of us La Juntans – have gotten so much value out of the Southwest railway systems. In a Universe where “the only thing constant is change,” let’s make sure losing Amtrak isn’t one of those changes.
What can we do to keep this train on track?